by Nalini Singh
I have you in my sights.
Squeezing her wings as tight to her back as she could manage, she picked her way through the cardboard castles that housed the flotsam and jetsam of the city. They weren’t exclusively human. Vampires could descend into this shadow life just like their mortal counterparts—all it took was an addiction to something. Certain enterprising bloodsuckers had created recreational drugs that worked on those of their kind, though apparently the high didn’t last long enough for most to bother.
More in vogue were “honey” feeds, where a human donor would get high on certain drugs then allow the vamp to feed. Vampiric biology soon neutralized the drugs, but not fast enough to totally negate the pleasure—and sex, of course, was also often on the same menu. All for a price. Then there was gambling, and the sadder cases where an individual, vamp or human, lost the struggle with personal demons no one else could see.
“Hunter.” The rasping whisper came from a shriveled-up old man tucked up inside a cardboard box fashioned into a home, the “curtains” open to reveal his reddened eyes and the brown-paper-bagged bottle in his hands.
Startled that he’d focused on what marked her as Guild, rather than the wings, Elena paused, a sick feeling in her stomach as her eyes adjusted enough to make out the knife scars on his hands. No hunter was ever left behind by his or her brethren . . . but some chose to walk out into the darkness and never return.
“Hunter,” she replied, giving back the same respect he’d offered her. “The Guild is always open to you.” All hunters paid a percentage of their income to the Guild; one of the reasons why was so the Guild could provide care should a hunter be physically or mentally incapacitated. “I can make the call.”
“I like it out here.”
Elena had no way of knowing what he’d survived, the reasons for his choices, so she made no judgment. “Are you here always?”
A nod.
“I’ll ask one of the Guild patrols to come by with some food.” They’d nudge him into better sleeping quarters, too, when the snow started to fall. “I can ask them to bring along a strong, basic tent for you.” Nothing that would make him a target for thieves. “Is that all right?”
A long pause, his eyes seeming to judge her before he said, “Long as they bring enough for two.” His gaze went to another cardboard enterprise a few feet over and across the narrow passageway. “Got to watch each other’s backs. It’s what we do.”
Elena nodded. “Stay safe.”
“Hunt well.”
Continuing down into the pitch-blackness of the passage until it spit her out the other end, Elena found herself in an enclosed parking lot behind an Asian restaurant; she’d hit the edge of Chinatown. A single yellow streetlamp doused the area in an anemic glow, creating pools of shadow as thick as liquid, the dark green Dumpsters a silent menace.
“Get a grip, Ellie.”
Following the suspicious scent to a broken part of the fence, she managed to get through the chain link without snagging her feathers. The scent was cleaner now, no longer overwhelmed by those of vampires, this area with its cheap and tasty restaurants a mortal haunt, though she knew a couple of angels who were regulars. The restaurants were closed up for the night, all except for a twenty-four-hour noodle place where a worker pushed a mop around while bopping to the music in his headphones.
A bedraggled mutt kept company with her for a block before being seduced by an overflowing Dumpster, though she saw the rotting carcass of more than one dead bird lying in the nooks and crannies. No one had bothered to clean them up here as they had in the restaurant area, and even the feral cats and dogs knew to steer clear of that festering meat.
When she looked around and saw the scaffolding, she realized the reason for the lack of care—no one was currently residing or doing business on this street, and from the looks of things, no construction workers had been by for a few days, either. Permit or money problems, probably.
A sudden end to the scent, there one second, gone the next.
Backing up, she realized the individual she was tracking had gone up the steps of one of the scaffolded buildings. Looks like our carrier is squatting. No security, so it wouldn’t be hard.
Is she present within?
Unless there’s a back entrance.
Wait. A pause before Raphael said, The back entrance is inaccessible.
Then she’s inside. I found one recent scent trail, with an older one beneath, so my take is, she went out to sell her blood and came straight back.
A sudden wind was the only sign that Raphael had landed on the street. Be careful on the steps, she said, having returned to the door. Looks like the target went through that window. Pushed up, the glass missing, it would’ve been just within reach if someone climbed up onto part of the scaffolding. We’ll need your manly muscles to get in. If that’s not beneath Your Archangelness.
His kiss took her by surprise, her mind scrambling to understand the fact that she was being deliciously taken by a man she couldn’t see. Releasing her before she’d gotten her head around it, he began to pry off the boards that barred the front door, doing so with an ease that made it appear the boards were just sitting there.
Thirty seconds later, the door was open.
18
Narrow, but we can get in if we angle our bodies. I’ll enter first.
I’m the hunter, Elena reminded him. I should go first.
Of course you may go first. When I am dead.
Scowling at that statement delivered in an eminently reasonable tone that had fooled her into thinking he was going to agree, she pulled out her crossbow. Go. We’ll argue about your autocratic tendencies later.
I look forward to it.
Since he’d dropped the glamour upon entering, his wings filled her vision until they came out into a more open area of what looked like a private residence, though it might well have been a combined business/home, the lower-floor open plan enough to have functioned as a retail shop.
Upstairs, she said, the scent trail a pulsing beacon.
You do not wish to clear this floor?
It’s only the dead down here. More than a few days, from the degradation of the disease smell. The bodies hadn’t rotted, likely because the house was as cold as a fridge, but it was no doubt the same vampire pox.
Her first victims?
Maybe her test subjects. Probably junkie vamps desperate for a honey feed—wouldn’t take much to seduce one if she looked strung out herself. Perfect meal.
Again, Raphael went ahead and, though they tried to be quiet, the stairs were old, creaked and groaned no matter what. However, there was no sign their target had heard anything, even when Elena almost fell through a weakened board and Raphael jerked her to safety. There was, in fact, no sign of life at all.
You’re certain she is here?
Yes. Her scent is rich and fresh. She met his eyes. I can’t tell if she’s dead or just sick, but the scent of the disease is very strong to my senses, especially considering her mortality.
Raphael stepped forward to look inside the doorway she indicated, while she swept quickly down to check the other room, make sure it was empty. His expression when she turned to face him told her all she needed to know.
“Damn it.” Walking into the room, she halted beside an old bed that looked like it had been forgotten when the house was stripped. In it lay their prey, her eyes wide open and unseeing, the exposed parts of her pasty skin bubbled with small sores that echoed the more virulent ones on the bodies of the other victims.
“A carrier who can only last a short time,” Raphael said, taking in the scene with a clinical eye. “Inefficient.”
“If we’re right and this is an attack against the city by one of the Cadre—”
“—then it could be he or she does not have the strength to immunize the carriers.” Raphael nodded. “All the Cascade-born abilities appear to be limited in terms of strength as yet.”
Elena eyeballed the body, but could find no signs that the
woman had been a junkie who might herself have been somehow infected, perhaps by another individual who was the actual carrier. They’d have to wait till the autopsy to get a definitive answer. Certain that Raphael had already contacted Keir, she took a good look around the room.
“Nothing.” She restrained the urge to kick at a mildewed wall, the mildew an improvement on the giant floral wallpaper. “There is absolutely nothing here that tells us who she was or where she came from.”
“Unsurprising. Her archangel would not want her to give herself away.”
Elena had to agree with Raphael’s unspoken conclusion that the woman must’ve volunteered for her task, because, while she looked pitiful now, a broken doll, she’d carried and disseminated death, pumping poison from her body each time she sold her blood. The dead vampires Elena had sensed downstairs made it inarguable the woman had known exactly what it was she was selling.
* * *
Midday, and Keir confirmed the disease in the girl’s body was identical to that found in the other victims. “But she had it far longer,” the healer said, old eyes tired in that beautiful face that could’ve been of a boy on the brink of manhood. “At least two weeks—which makes her either the first victim or the carrier.”
Elena kept her ear to the ground for any other reports of vampires dead of mysterious circumstances. Nothing. Not for the four days that followed their discovery of the girl it was becoming more and more certain had been the sole carrier. Finally, on the fifth day, they cleared Blood-for-Less for renewed use of donor blood, with continuing spot checks just to be certain.
“Is there any way we can wriggle out of this ball?” she said to Raphael on the eve of their journey to Amanat, the two of them in bed after an unexpectedly playful loving that had flowed on from a sparring session where they’d worked out the tension that had had them in its clawlike grip for days, as they waited for the other shoe to drop . . . only for the ordinary rhythm of life to descend upon the city.
It wasn’t peace—it was New York—but it certainly wasn’t a war. “I know you don’t want to leave the city.” Neither did she, an itch on the back of her neck that said, this odd lull aside, the Falling and the disease had only been the beginning.
“To not attend,” Raphael said, his wing warm and strong under her body, his voice exquisitely familiar in the moonless dark, “would be seen as a sign of distrust in Illium, Aodhan, and the squadrons that guard the Tower.”
Comforted by the steady beat of his heart, she drew lazy designs on the muscled heat of his chest. “Will that matter if the city is attacked by frothing-at-the-mouth reborn while we’re eating bonbons in Amanat?”
“You have such a vivid way of putting things, hbeebti.” His fingers stroking the sensitive inner edges of her wings, the act an absent one that made her deeply happy in a way she didn’t consciously understand. “But no hordes will descend upon the city during the span of the ball.”
Stretching out her wings in a silent request, she sighed as he stroked outward. “You sound confident.”
“The one behind these attacks is no doubt Cadre. No other angel could’ve gained such abilities even in the Cascade.”
Elena nodded, having seen Jessamy’s research on the results of the last Cascade. Any information was fragmented at best, but the historian had been able to tentatively confirm Caliane’s recollection that it was only the archangels who’d been fundamentally altered. “I get your point,” she said. “Whoever it is, is caught in the same trap.”
Raphael moved her hair aside to massage her nape, his other hand folded behind his head. “He or she must attend the ball or it’ll not only be an insult to the sole Ancient awake in the world, but a sign the archangel in question does not trust those he would’ve otherwise left in charge. Then there is the other factor.”
“Wait, don’t tell me.” Bones having melted as a result of the way he was touching her, she revved up her brain and struggled up onto her elbow so she could see his expression as she tested her understanding of how archangels saw the world. “It would be considered extremely bad manners,” she said in the frigid tones of some of the stiffer old angels, “to attack a city while its archangel was at a ball thrown by an Ancient. Why, really, you might as well have been brought up by mortals, if you’re going to act that way.”
“Absurd, is it not?” Laugher in the intoxicating blue, his hand a possessive weight on her lower back. “Yet those rules of Guesthood are part of what keeps the world stable. Any archangel so ill-mannered as to step outside them in such an unspeakable fashion would find themselves ostracized. Eternity is a long time to be friendless.”
“Put that way,” Elena said, leaning down to steal a kiss just because she could, “it’s not absurd but totally rational. How else would anyone ever have a party, with the way certain archangels are always trying to backstab others.”
A smile curving his mouth, her archangel nodded. “Even Lijuan couldn’t bear such a shunning. She might be able to compel obedience through brute force, but she’d lose the respect that is as much her lifeblood as power.” Fingers idly caressing the lower curves of her body. “Can you guess the true irony of this particular situation?”
Screwing up her face, she was about to say no when it hit. Laughing so hard she had to wait until she could catch her breath enough to shape words, she said, “Lijuan isn’t invited”—not after trying to murder Caliane and her son—“but she’s such a stickler for the old ways, the others know they’ll have her on their ass if they break the rules.”
“Exactly.”
“I wonder if there’s an Angelic Etiquette handbook some—” Breaking off, she touched her fingers to Raphael’s right temple.
“What is it?” Incisive intelligence in his gaze.
“Wait.” She switched on the lamps that bathed the top half of the bed in a gentle light. Leaning back down, she went close to Raphael’s face, rubbed her thumb over the spot, his hair brushing against her fingertips. “There’s something on your skin.” Unable to let it go, she got out of bed to grab a wet facecloth.
Raphael was in the bathroom doorway when she turned from the sink. Asking him to bend down so she could wipe at the tiny speck, she tried twice, the second time with a dab of soap on the cloth in case he’d somehow been touched by the tip of a permanent black marker . . . except even as the thought crossed her mind, she knew she would’ve noticed it earlier.
The speck hadn’t been there before, and now—“It’s not coming off.” Her voice sounded even, despite the horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Shifting into the bathroom, Raphael examined his face in the mirror. Elena came up beside him, wanting to believe it had been a trick of the light. It hadn’t. So tiny, the speck would go unnoticed by most, but it shouldn’t be there. “Maybe it’s an insect bite,” she began, trying not to think about dead vampires and disease.
“No, we heal too fast for a bite to have any impact.” Expression grim, he turned to her. “Can you see it now?”
“No, it’s gone.” Crushing relief. “What did you do?”
“It is still there,” he said, and the relief curdled. “I’ve concealed it using the barest hint of glamour.”
“I wish Keir was still here.” The healer had had to return to the Refuge to deal with other matters, would meet them again in Amanat. “What if . . .” She couldn’t say it, couldn’t even imagine it, her horror too violent.
“What if it is the harbinger of disease?” Raphael said for her. “If it is, Keir would be unable to do anything, so telling him is a moot point. I am an archangel, Elena. We may go mad with age and time, or because of the toxin, but we do not get sick.”
His blunt words forced her to face the cold, hard fact that an archangel sick was a tear in the fabric of the world. That didn’t mean she was about to give up. “Jessamy,” she said. “She’d never betray you—we can ask her to search the Archives, see if there’ve been any similar cases in angelic history.”
“There is nothing to te
ll her yet,” Raphael answered with impossible calm. “It is but a single dark spot—if it’s the sign of a disease created by a new archangelic power, my body should be able to fight it off.”
“Of course, your healing ability.” She turned to go throw some water onto her face in an effort to still her racing heart, her hands trembling, but Raphael tugged her into his arms and against his chest, his wings enclosing her in a silken prison.
“It is all right, hbeebti.” His heartbeat strong and steady under her cheek as he spoke, his arms muscled steel. “I have no intention of leaving you to face immortality alone.”
“If this is death, Guild Hunter, then I will see you on the other side.”
He’d said that to her as she lay dying in his arms. Now, she whispered, “Wherever you go, I’ll follow.” She’d lost too many people she loved, survived too much death. “I can’t keep going. I can’t.” As if she’d turned a nightmare key, she heard the sound that had haunted her since the day Slater Patalis walked into her childhood home.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
There’d been so much blood, her feet sliding in it to send her to the floor with bruising force.
“Come, Elena.” Raphael’s voice held a gentleness that told her he saw her terror, understood it. “Do you think I am so weak? Such a belief is a blow to my ego indeed.”
Elena tried to smile, to not permit the fear to consume her, but it raged within, born of a childhood where everyone she loved had been taken from her. Jeffrey and Beth might have survived the massacre, but they’d been lost to Elena all the same. She couldn’t lose Raphael, too. She couldn’t.
The panicked thoughts ran in a loop inside her mind until it was all she was.
Then the rain-lashed sea was there, cutting through the dark clouds of memory. Reaching for Raphael with body and mind both, she drowned herself in the sheer powerful life force of the archangel who was the only man she would ever love.